Arizona Grand Canyon Tour and Travel

Project Description

Having been given a challenge to improve the usability of the Grand Canyon Tour & Travel website, we began with user research. We developed personas in order to understand your target audience. Through an evaluation of your user interface, we discovered some usability issues. By applying a variety of evaluation techniques, we have come up with a few recommendations and solutions to improve the website’s functionality and user experience. Exploring how users interact with a client’s website, focusing on user-centered-design, then analyzing and testing website usability is important in reaching a greater market audience. Our goal is a positive, satisfactory user experience.

After developing and producing a whole new design we have seen more improvements that we can possibly conquer in the future. Here are the main key points of our summary:

The simplicity of the website really helped our future customers navigate through all the pages

Some of the content may have been difficult to find because our drop down menu did not work on our proofs

Most users called the website simple, easy and clean (we had mostly positive responses!)

We still have many things to improve in the future such as the contact us and the social media page

Project Details

Client: Grand Canyon Tour & Travel

Tasks: Concept, Design & UX for class team project

Designed by: Zuzanna Czerny with the help of James Mitman and Terrial Haley

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STEP ONE

Heuristic Evaluations & Website Research

STEP TWO

Information Architecture and Testing

STEP THREE

Usability Testing (6 users) and Results

Based off of our research we have decided to go with some rather intuitive navigation categories and labels. We started with a bottom up approach through an online open card sorting website. The reason we used this approach was because it was much easier to get more participants involved when they could do their card sort in the comfort of their own home or workplace. We listed all of the main labels located currently on the Grand Canyon Tour & Travel website. The participants then decided which categories each label should fit into and named the categories based off of their personal preferences.

First off, every participant broke the destinations and tour options into different categories, while a majority also included social sites as its own navigation. There was a problem though with using the already existing labels from the Grand Canyon Tour & Travel website, a few of them were unnecessary. Labels such as, “Biking Tours”, “Hiking Tours”, and “Train Tours”, all had only one tour choice. We came to the conclusion that perhaps combining a few of these labels would make the most sense to reduce the clutter on the website.

PERSONAS

SCENARIOS

Questions that were asked during testing.

Scenario 1

You and your family are traveling to the Grand Canyon, and you have heard about a website that offers travel plans. You are thinking about going on a bike tour.

Where would you click to find information about the Grand Canyon Tours?

Where would you search to find information on the Grand Canyon?

Where would you locate the Bike Tours?

Scenario 2

You want to propose to your partner and you want to take him/her to Las Vegas and on the way you want to stop for an exciting and spontaneous trip!

Where would you click to find information on noteworthy travel experiences?

Where would you find more information regarding the Hot Air Balloon ride?

How would you navigate back to the home page?

Scenario 3

You were interested in one of the trips however you would like more information, you are attempting to connect with the customer service offices of Grand Canyon Tour and Travel.

What would your first step be?

Where would you locate the phone number?

Where would you go to submit a question to the Grand Canyon Tour and Travel customer services?

Scenario 4

After going on an awesome adventure you wish to add Grand Canyon Tours on Facebook and Instagram to follow other people’s adventures and to see your own tagged photos of your trip.

Where would you click?

How would you get back to the home page?

Which social media site would you look for? (To understand what the users would want)

FINAL DESIGNS

These designs were used for testing.

TESTER FEEDBACK

This is what our testers said.

What are two things you really liked about the design?

Ease of use, informative

The pictures used.

Simple and organized.

Modern design and nice pictures

I liked the top bar and simplicity

Color, pictures, semisimple for intellectual man.

Are there any improvements you would like to make?

Less links

Make the logo and website more captivating. Only include 1 navigation bar.

Lots of options and links on the website for navigating, not sure they are all necessary.

Middle part could use something color wise.

Lettering in photos need to be visible to naked eye/ or have to pop out.

What are two things you did not like about the design?

Too many links, information broken down too much.

Home needs to be icon. Contact info to small.

There were 2 navigation bars and lack of pictures showing tour groups.

Views and Date selector? Tours is on the top and also in 2 other places.

Some pages were bland and the search bar seems unnecessary.

Contact us style, it just something I hate because they take forever to reply back to or never respond.

CONCLUSION

Information gathered from the site’s audience has shown people like a variety of different qualities in their website. Strong company values, good descriptions, a clear navigation, and a well organized responsive site are very important to the visitors. But most of all they want to feel inspired by the exciting adventure options.

Through a great deal of research and usability testing, we have improved very key areas of all 7 elements of user experience. Ranging from the strategy behind the Grand Canyon Tour and Travel brand, to the very surface of the website. Moving forward, we have established a good foundation to expand upon and grow as the visitors achieve a greater user experience. We hope that the Grand Canyon Tour and Travel will take our data and recommendations to create a cool interactive and user friendly new website!